Trivia / Chappelle's Show

• Artist Disillusionment: As he said in response to fans constantly quoting his most famous line out of context:
  Chappelle: You know why my show is good? Because the network officials say you're not smart enough to get what I'm doing, and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid.
• Amateur Cast: Most of the side cast (for example Anthony Berry and Yoshio Mita) have not acted since the show, though with a few exceptions. Some are even one book authors.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Wayne Brady mentions the line "Is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?" to be misquoted in an interview.
• Colbert Bump: By the early 2000s, Rick James had been disgraced thanks to drug arrests and a 3-year prison sentence. Then Dave Chappelle spoofed his life and Rick's popularity reached new heights.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Dave left the show mostly due to the way he felt the racial humor had gone, the fanbase that refused to stop repeating his famous lines and how Comedy Central treated the show. The fact that he had gone from stuff like Half Baked to becoming a cultural icon in less than five years might also have been a bit too much for him to take in all at once. Dave also said that he didn't believe the third season could possibly live up to the hype of his $50 million contract; he tried to keep the contract a secret from the media and was upset to see the headline in the newspaper.
  • Wayne Brady's famous guest role came about because he was not pleased with the joke that he "makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X." When it came back around to Chappelle he reached out to Brady personally and said he wasn't fond of the joke either, as it was written by Paul Mooney and got a few laughs in the writers room, as it fed into the stereotypes of The Whitest Black Guy and Stop Being Stereotypical. That lead to Brady's later appearance where he got to play with that reputation.
• Defictionalization:
  • Sort of. The "Trading Spouses" sketch was meant to make fun of the Reality TV craze. A little while later ABC announced that they were going to do an American version of Wife Swap. A couple of weeks before its debut, Fox premiered Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy, and ABC accused them of ripping off their show.
  • A Rick James comedy biopic was apparently in the works for some time, with Chappelle reprising his role; James' death put a stop to it.
• Distanced from Current Events: When the show was added to HBO Max and Netflix in November 2020, one episode was omitted due to containing a cameo by porn actor Ron Jeremy, who was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault earlier that same year.
• Executive Meddling: One of the reasons Dave quit was all the fights with the network. In particular: they wanted more Catchphrase-type sketches and fratboy humor.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The DVDs lack about half of the live musical performances due to licensing disagreements. However, since Comedy Central reruns the show periodically, it shouldn't be too hard to find this material. The DVDs, despite being huge sellers that can easily be found second-hand anywhere, ultimately fell out of print for a couple of years. In 2012 Comedy Central reissued the entire series as a box set. The series was also on Hulu in its entirety before it was removed in 2017 and currently on Pluto TV and Paramount+ and on digital storefronts, without censorship (as mentioned above, the HBO Max version skipped over an episode that had Ron Jeremy in a cameo due to being charged with sexual assault).
  • After the show was added to Netflix and HBO Max in 2020, Chappelle (during a monologue on Saturday Night Live) implored fans not to watch the series on streaming, as he does not make any royalties from the series' streaming success due to a contract with ViacomCBS. In response, Netflix took the series down from its platform; HBO Max eventually did likewise. Both platforms restored the show in early 2021 after Chapelle’s issues with ViacomCBS were resolved.
• Life Imitates Art:
  • The final skit of the show's "third season" (filmed before Dave left) has Dave meeting with The All Powerful Show Business, who offers him various ways to capitalize on his popularity (i.e. Dave Chappelle cereal, a Lil Jon movie and an MTV Cribs appearance). The skit ends with Dave walking away from show business. Likewise, the famous Wayne Brady episode opens with a prologue segment in which Dave Chappelle "quits" the show due to the insane filming schedule and Executive Meddling. Both ended up mirroring Dave leaving the show as, while it was mostly credited to Artist Disillusionment over Dave feeling that the show's racial humor became a minstrel show over time, Executive Meddling was also one of the reasons. Even on the DVD Commentary, he admits that the schedule line was very true.
  • Similarly, after appearing on the series, Wayne Brady landed a multi-episode stint on the FX show Dirt, playing an Affably Evil employee for a murderous rap mogul who threatens to castrate one of the cast members and force-feed them their own penis. Not to mention breaking a basketball player's kneecaps.
• Missing Episode
  • The entire "third season" (hosted by Charlie Murphy and Donnell Rawlings, two of the show's writers and actors) was advertised as "The Lost Episodes", which aired two years after the second season and consisted of skits Dave Chappelle was filming before he left the show. Chappelle was displeased with the airing of these skits, as they were mostly unfinished and offensive, particularly the "Racial Pixie" sketch.
  • Season two also had an episode based around "lost sketches", that were filmed but ultimately not aired at that point. In particular, one sketch, a sequel to the season one "Player Haters Ball" was only partially shown.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The show was pulled from Netflix and HBO Max in late-2020 after Dave notified them that ViacomCBS wasn't paying him royalties for the streaming release.
• Throw It In!: A lot of the sketches were improvised, including a majority of the Mad Real World. At one point, Chappelle's character is playing street craps when he hears the siren and tells the others to scatter. That was not scripted, an actual police siren was heard while filming, and they kept it in.
• What Could Have Been: Originally, Bobby Brown was going to be the featured celebrity on the Sesame Street parody "Kneehigh Park", but his arrest prevented him from doing so. He was replaced with Q-Tip.

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